


I'm Not Alive

by ScreamPuff



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Blood and Gore, But not really death, Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, POV First Person, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2016-08-24
Packaged: 2018-08-10 18:38:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7856647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScreamPuff/pseuds/ScreamPuff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Imagine how hard it is to move away from your best friend since high school. Now, imagine how hard it is to move to a state that is silently being plagued with a blood disease which will inevitably take your life?</p>
<p>Well. Sort of.</p>
<p>Lapis Lazuli died 7 months ago, yet she is still walking the halls of the college dorms, now rendered useless education wise.<br/>Peridot Piper's best friend died 7 months ago, and she goes on feeling more lifeless than ever. That is, until she received a call from the dead. Pun intended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Not Alive

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so, this story. Wow. I have actually been wanting to write this for awhile, but I always had the lack of motivation to get through it. I originally intended for it to be a real novel, but without literally any experiences, I thought it would be best if I were to dabble into the world of fanfiction writing to kickstart my writing habits.  
> So in other words, yes, this is my first fanfiction. Some characters will be non canon because, well, I cannot imagine anyone from the SU universe being like Dr. Shepherd for starters. Except maybe a Diamond. But I want the Dr. to be a dude. Aaaannnnd now I am rambling. 
> 
> Things are subject to change, I am writing as I go. Tags will get placed in as I go. I still have no idea who all will be thrown into the story. So, here we go!

“Hello?”

My breath stopped cold in my throat as her voice penetrated my ears. Time around me seemed to stand still, while the only living thing was her on the opposite end of the line. I almost didn’t catch as she repeated her question again, only more serious. Though, against all my desires to answer back, I hastily pulled the phone away and pressed end. Looking down at the phone in my gloved hand, I remembered why it was that I didn’t want to call her. Tightening my grip on the phone, I slammed it down on the table with an exasperated sigh.

A knock on the door sounded behind me. Turning around, I saw my _benefactor_ standing in the doorway. He smirked and leaned against the wall. “Long day?”  
  
“Nah, I actually just woke up.” I told him, crossing my arms.  
  
His eyes shifted down to the phone, then back up to mine, eyebrow raised. “That poor girl.” He grunted as he began to aimlessly walk around my room. My eyes stayed glued to him as he picked up a picture sitting on my desk. “To think she has been getting calls from her assuredly dead friend, who in fact is too scared to say ‘hello’, and she doesn’t even know it.”  
  
The room was silent as we eyed each other. “Well, maybe it’s better if I stayed dead to her in the end.” I reply quietly. This defeated gall of mine always turns up when I fail to call. Though, my seemingly dead motivation is always resurrected by the idea that she is waiting on the other end of this meaningless tool of a phone.  
  
With another smirk, the man, who I have come to known as Dr. Shepherd, set the picture down with a lack of interest. “Think of it this way. How would you feel if it were the other way around? Imagine if this friend of yours had mysteriously died. You wouldn’t even know that in reality, she is alive. She is alive, and she is suffering and she-”  
  
“Except I am not alive!” The shout escapes my lungs before I could even consider anything else he had to say. Somehow within that time, I had clutched the phone to my chest while tears fought to escape my eyes.  
  
Dr. Shepherd nodded once, then walked to the door. Upon leaving, he stopped just outside the frame, doorknob still clutched in his hand behind him. “I don’t know if you are trying to convince me, or yourself, but you better figure it out quickly. I don’t know about you, but I see someone who is standing, breathing, speaking, and emotionally torn. That sounds like ‘alive’ to me.”  
  
With that, he closed the door. I could hear his steps proceeding away down the hall as I stood there, taking in what I had heard. I glanced down at the phone in my hand. The display was on, and her profile face was smiling up at me. Claiming victory, my sob choked out and broke free. To think that everything I had worked towards had to be taken away from me in a matter of moments. I will never be able to complete college, I will never be able to travel to new places, I will never be able to have a normal job, I will never be able to love.  
  
All because I live here. All because I wanted to stay to complete college, because I didn’t travel away, because I had a stable job, because I didn’t love enough.  
If I told her I was still alive, she would want to find me. I can’t risk that. I can’t have her come here to this hell hole.  
  
Maybe it would be better if I _did_ die. For real, at least. Feeling the cool draft of wind enter the room, I glanced over at the source. As though it were beckoning me like a siren, my window called me over with its cracked open demeanor. Trembling, I turned off my phone’s display and gently set it down once more. I crossed the room as silently as a ghost, swayed ever so easily by the song of the winds of the outside air.  
  
Throwing up the window, I glanced down. The college dorms went up four stories, and my room sat on the third. It could be as easy as this. I could just close my eyes, lean forward and let gravity decide my fate for me.  
  
A sudden and ironically cheery tune filled the air behind me. Turning back to my desk, I notice my phone was lit up with the ‘incoming call’ text. It was her, calling me back. She is probably mad that someone is calling her from her dead friend’s phone. Or, she is probably hopeful that her dead friend was, in fact, not dead.

With a hiss of annoyance, I turned back to the window. As much as I longed to hear her voice, to assure her that I am still here, I knew I couldn’t. It would do more damage than it was worth. Although the tempting promises that phone call had to offer, I knew the only for sure way to prevent myself from answering it was to fall.

And so, I did. I closed my eyes as I felt the air hit my face harder and harder, my head strained from all the sudden pressure pulling me further down. The only thing I noticed before I hit the ground was that my heart still couldn’t beat harder to match all these sudden endorphins.

I didn’t have a heart beat at all.

I hit the ground shoulder first, then everything went black. Well, not everything. My vision faded away, but I still felt everything. I felt my shoulder get demolished as the ground broke through it and shattered my collar bone. My ribs cracked and snapped and my vertebrae bent and broke. My limbs twisted agonizingly and my head snapped to the side. All the meanwhile, my brain laughed at me, torturing me, tormenting me, daring me to take another breath. And I did. With my exhale, I allowed one word to exit my mouth with a guttural pool of blood following up.

“Peridot...”

* * *

 

I woke up in the infirmary. Or, nurse’s office. My left eye struggled to open. It was caked shut in a dried up cloak of blood from my head. I groaned and pushed my head back against the fluffy pillow in defeat.

“Long day?” I hear the same voice from before on my left side. How irritating.

I rolled my head over to see him smiling down at me. “You already used that greeting today. Try for some originality sometimes.” I grumbled, half audible.

Dr. Shepherd bellowed out in laughter. “You say that, yet this is the third time you have thrown yourself from your window. Where’s your originality there? You should realize by now that simply rearranging your bones won’t kill you.”

“Rearranging my bones. What a nice way to put something that is so painful.” I replied, rolling my eyes. Er, eye. As though he just noticed, Dr. Shepherd grunted and stood up. He made his way over to the sink and dampened a towel.

“… You know, putting your body through all this trauma will have a terrible impact on you, Lapis. You will need more food a lot sooner than before.” He told me, walking back over to dab at the mess over my eyelid.

I felt my body sink further into the bed. “I wish you wouldn’t call it something so innocent _food_. It sort of… Makes me lose my appetite.”

The Doctor was silent as he completed his task of freeing my eyesight. He dropped the rag into a bin, and turned to me. “I know you despise doing what it is we do. But you of all people knows what happened when you don’t get the sustenance you require. After that fall, you suffered many serious injuries and lost a lot of blood. We might be able to heal our damaged cells faster than before, but we need _life_ to do that. We gave you a blood transaction, but due to it being tempered over time, it will only serve as a temporary solution. You will decay if you don’t replenish.”

I nodded. I knew the consequences all too well. Although I hated it, the feeling of decay was enough of a motivation to suffer through eating living flesh.

The world is sick and cruel. If there are any gods out there, all I can say is ‘fuck you’ for allowing such a disease to run rampant through the world. At this moment, it is only spreading throughout the west coast of the United States and Canada. With Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, and California (where I reside) all being infected, the rest of the states had set up protections to prevent anyone from said states from entering theirs. It will probably break through, eventually. But for now, they can all go on living a happy life without even knowing what it is like to have no working heart.

Newspapers and television are constantly blaring on about the ‘impending zombie apocalypse!’, and while I can agree that it is the closest description for what has happened to us, we are not zombies. We’re sick people, to put it simply. We still think, we still breath, we still function, we still have our humanity. Well, for the most part.

How we get by without a functioning heart? It’s kind of ironic. The heart is not pumping our blood throughout our system, but the muscles are still functioning. The veins and arteries are constantly vibrating, causing the blood to continue to make its way throughout the body. It’s weird to think about it like that. The spleen constantly needs to be slapped awake to do its job and recycle the decaying blood cells. Along with the cells, the spleen is constantly decaying and slowing down. If it does that, after about a month, all of the blood cells you had previously had would have all died out and you would be left with dead blood. With dead blood, your body doesn’t get the nutrients it needs, and it starts to break down. Decay starts from the further regions of the body and makes its way inward. You can stop it and continue the blood cycle again, but you can never replace the decayed body parts you may have lost.

How we continue the blood cycle, you ask? It’s simple. Eat something living, absorb the nutrients, and the dead blood cells will essentially take the living blood cells hostage and make them work for your body in place of the other’s.

Yeah, I know. It’s pretty crazy to think about it. I was in denial for the longest time, and as a result…

I looked down at my hand, still clad in its glove. I shudder to think about that time in my life, and if I could relive anything again, I can think of nothing that wouldn’t top that.

Dr. Shepherd probably realized I was spacing out really hard and cleared his throat. I looked up at him, blinking back into reality. Albeit, a shitty one. “You should be okay for a few days, but I really advise getting something in you pretty soon.” He patted my knee (ouch) and smiled at me warmly. With that, he left the infirmary.

Sudden realization of the extreme pain I was in hit me like a bus. My face twisted in sheer agony as I physically felt my bones struggling to mend themselves once more. Closing my eyes, I shook my head side to side against the pillow, begging for it to be over.

Out of the blue, that cheery tune started playing once more. I cracked open my eyes and glanced around the room for the source. Sure enough, my phone was laying on the bedside table beside me. While my body pleaded against it, I raised my arm excruciatingly and grasped hold of the small device. Bringing it up to my face, I could see that she was calling me. Again. Panic shot through my whole being as I pressed decline. I had almost forgotten about the pain my body was going through as I gulped in fear. I had 17 missed calls, all being from the same source. She has been calling nonstop since I called her 6 hours ago.

A voice in the back of my head echoed what the doctor had told me previously. _Imagine if it were her._ Letting that sink in, I swallowed the lump building in my throat and pressed the ‘call back’ button. Almost instantly, I am greeted by, “If this in some way is some outlandish prank to mess with me, then you have some crude sense of humor as to call me from Lapis’ phone!”

Despite the situation, I smiled. Peridot was still this little ranting time bomb that I remembered. Hell, I could imagine her standing from her chair, unable to sit down. Fist balled to her side while she glares angrily down at the phone waiting for an answer. I wonder if she ever grew out her short spikey blonde hair, or if she kept it the same. I wonder if her glasses still slide down her nose when her face is all scrunched up in an adorable frustration. In fact, I laughed at the image I was getting. Then I sobbed. Here I was, on the line with Peridot once more and I am at a loss for words. All I could do was a gross mixture of a laugh and a cry.

“Wh-what?” Her voiced trembled. “Lapis? Is… Is it really you?  What happened to you? Is everything alright? Where have you been all this time? Everybody was claiming that you had perished, and what with California being quarantined under the threat of that disease, I had come to the worst possible conclusion.”

I sniffled and wiped a tear away from my face. She really did worry about me. I wonder how far she went to dig up the information she had so desperately wanted, only to be realize it was all futile. There were so many things I wanted to tell her about what had happened to me, but in the end, the only thing I could bring myself to say is, “You never change, Peridot.”

**Author's Note:**

> By the way, this is writing in first person because, well, I want it to be like that! The POV will change between Lapis and Peridot.  
> And wow am I not original with title names or anything.
> 
> Oh boy time to post. This is an exciting, yet scary feeling of uneasiness I am experiencing. I hope people actually enjoy this weird and deranged zombie like story I got going on here. I can promise, it will get fluff later on. But ya know, zombies and stuff. It'll be hard.


End file.
